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10/03/2010

SharePoint 2010: Playing with the Multilingual User Interface with JavaScript

I was doing some testing with the new SharePoint 2010 “multilingual user interface” (MUI) feature. If you have not seen this yet, Google/Bing it. In playing with this I got to thinking that no typical user would ever discover it. I can just see SharePoint sites everywhere with a block of text on every home page with instructions: “How to change the language settings…”. So after we get past some background on MUI, I’ll show what I’ve been playing with for user interfaces.

In case you have not, here’s some quick background.

You must have language packs installed for each language

There is no user language detection– a user must pick the language

User created text (list and library content) is not multilingual

Help files and administration pages are multilingual

Site title, Quick Launch and Tab text can be entered in each language

Managed metadata supports multiple languages

Text can be exported for translation and then imported

Search indexes sites in the default language of the SharePoint installation – the other languages are ignored

Web Part titles and descriptions do not change in the user interface, unless a Web Part is a list-based Web Part

Turn on support for multiple languages: Site Actions, Site Settings, Language Settings (Must be done for each site!)

Test by going to the Welcome menu (the “your name” dropdown at the top right of the page) and clicking Select Display Language.

And there’s the problem!

As you can see in the screen above, the user has to “discover” that language options in the Welcome menu. How many new SharePoint users do you know that will ever click on their name at the top of the page?

Turns out the mechanism for language selection is quite simple. The link above just calls a JavaScript function that stores a cookie and then reloads the page. You can do your own language selection either by creating your own cookie (not the best idea) or calling SharePoint’s built-in function.

5 comments:

> is there any way to hide the OOB MUI selection user interface and use our custom one?

Should be pretty easy. You can add some JavaScript to the master page to hide the link in the Welcome menu. If you have access to the server files in the LAYOUTS folder then you can edit the welcome.ascx file. See here for an example: http://miss-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/01/edit-welcome-dropdown-menu.html

If you want to add your own links to the Welcome menu use a Feature and define the new link(s) in the feature XML. Here's one example: http://huynhvothinh.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/add-menu-personalactions-feature-at-microsoft-sharepoint-standardmenu/